For several weeks now I have been trying to support our friend Christine, Fran’s former and foremost aide during her illness. She has cancer and has been bedridden till this week after 3 weeks in hospital.
She is pleading with me to get WhatsApp as, to her it is the easiest way to communicate. After reading all the advantages she has mentioned there is only one over my current method of email and facebook on the PC, and that is of course, neither of those work outside of the house. Not a problem for me, I don’t want to hold conversations walking down the street or driving the car and, in any case typing a keyboard is way more comfortable than tapping tiny phone keys.
But I am a reasonable chap and I do owe her a lot so I googled cheap smartphones. The best I could find was a Samsung 15 or something for only €1. I clicked on the link but it is all double Dutch to me but I did see something about a ‘package at 200 GB for €49.99’. So not just a euro then, but how is that cheaper than email or FB?
I did try, again after Googling, to download WhatsApp onto my PC, and it can be done with Windows 10. But how do you use it? Why, you link it to your bloody smartphone, that’s how.
What is the absolute cheapest way anybody can tell me to use WhatsApp? Please.
The need for a smartphone to use WhatsApp is something I’ve never got around.
It sounds like the offer you found was for a contract, providing far more data than you’d ever use. If all you want is WhatsApp, you don’t need much data.
The way I would do it is
a. find a cheap, unlocked (and therefore not tied to any particular phone service provider) Android phone on Amazon, which had plenty of good reviews - around 100€ and
b. find the phone service provider with the best coverage in my area, and sign up for a maybe 1Go per month package, which might cost 3 €/m.
Samsung, Xiaomi, Motorola, Huawei are among the phone brands I’d be looking at.
I assume @David_Spardo already has a mobile phone with some provider or other - is it worth looking at packages his current SIM card provider has and just augments it with a bit of data allowance after transferring it to the new phone? I doubt if David wants to be bothered with two phones…
Agree with the first bit about finding a cheap unlocked Android one but David shouldn’t need to pay 100€ for it as he’s not going to need or want the bells and whistles most Smartphone users find essential. I got a basic new Samsung from a local shop recently for 120€ so a used one should be way cheaper.
That will be phone + SIM on a monthly abonnement and likely a 12-24 month tie in.
As others have pointed out you just need a phone and a cheap SIM deal - in fact most SIM contracts have at least a bit of data so you might not even need a new contract.
I have a couple of older Android phones kicking around - you can have one gratis (well, for the cost of postage from the UK).
Wow, advertising has really got to some, there are phones that easily rival samsung for a lot less, been using many over the years. Doogee, Elephone, Xgody, Alcatel, etc, buy new so battery is fresh under £50
Thank you, but I’m certainly not going to pay 100 quid just to talk to one person. Even €3 is double what I pay a month for my small fliptop. The other thing is that with all the flurry of texts she has filled up the memory on my little phone.
@RicePudding It looks interesting and does definitely say you don’t need a smartphone but then goes on a bit later to talk about transferring to or from your phone and not to use both. Very confusing. But I will try and check it further wthout committing to anything.
BTW, while I answering @Porridge my son rang me on his smartphone from Macao airport to have a chat while he waits for his plane, so I am well behind on this thread, which is why I referenced @RicePudding at the start so everybody below him realises who I am talking to.
That’s very generous @billybutcher but my head is buzzing with all this tech at the moment so I’ll pass at the moment. I’m trying to persuade her to reply with texts at the moment, not really my thing but better than shelling out for yet something else I don’t understand.
One last thing. I have an Android tablet which I only bought so I could choose music on Spottify to go to sleep with, but I have found it pretty unfriendly and thus is little used. But, could that work with WhatsApp? Pretty sure I know the answer but just thought I’d mention it.
So, do I just download WhatsApp onto it in the same way that I did with my PC, but won’t it still want me to link to a phone to start it it off? Or can I just give it my fliptop phone number instead?
Hit a massive snag.
I switched the tablet on and as usual it powered itself slowly into life.
The opening screen appears and I waited while it recognised the Livebox
Prepared to enter into the Google strip at the top the words WhatsApp but, instead of accepting the words, the strip greyed out and the whole screen froze.
I can’t even turn it off so the well worn phrase, ‘reboot’ has no value
It will run out of battery eventually, but is at 100% at the moment, as the screen is still lit after 20 minutes and not darkened as it normally would.
Short of bashing it against the wall, I am at a loss, and can’t even try your helpful suggestion.
@David, re your tablet, you could try pressing the on/off switch and the Volume Decrease button at the same time for 5s or so, that should force the tablet to reboot (called hard reboot).
I’ll try that now, but while I’m doing it, any idea how I can shift the accept cookies panel on my other android tablet which I only use for alarms and podcasts? I can see the WhatsApp panel behind it but cannot get to it.
I am not a fan of Android.
Thats fixed the larger tablet, at last it switched off and is now booting up again. I’ll try the same with the other one.
Larger tablet started again but as soon as I tapped the Google strip, it greyed out and the whole thing froze again. Tried again and this time it worked. Tapped in WhatsApp and it offered me an installtion. Tapped install and it says no app found to install link.
The big one let me pass the cookie panel and, at the 2nd or 3rd attempt is now installing, I think
Oh dear it was going so well but now shows the same as the pc download and is asking mt to open WhatsApp on my primary phone. There is no list that @billybutcher showed above
I think it is time to give it up, almost 2 hours since I first started this with 2 different Android devices and all the way round and back to zero. As I thought at the beginning, there is no way to get WhatsApp without a smart phone and I am certainly not shelling out all that money to talk to one person.
Nevertheless, thank you to all of you who tried to help with the impossible.
